Rethinking Supply-Side Approaches to L.A.'s Affordable Housing Crisis

In the last decade, the tech boom and resulting influx of high-income households to Southern California—Los Angeles County in particular—has only exacerbated the region’s worsening income inequality and need for affordable housing. TPR asked Denny Zane, executive director of Move LA and former mayor of Santa Monica, to address the merits of YIMBY, supply-side answers to the state’s housing crisis; state usurpation of local control over zoning and planning; and the political downsides of state legislation linking transit infrastructure to upzoning R1 neighborhoods. 

Zane further reminds policymakers that local, community-focused decision making truly trumps the top-down, one-size-fits-all approach of bills like SB 50, which dominated debate this legislative session. He comments:

"If the state wants to solve the real problem that we have, it would be making sure that cities had sufficient resources and motivation to build affordable housing and not force them to build higher density market-rate housing on an imagined principle that if you increase the supply of market rate-housing that somehow affordable housing shows up somewhere."

Read the full interview at The Planning Report.